With China controlling most of valuable rare-earth mineral
supplies, India makes a strategic move to back exploration off its own
coast, writes Paula Park.

India has joined the race to explore and develop deep-sea
mining for rare earth elements — further complicating the geopolitics
surrounding untapped sources of valuable minerals beneath the oceans.

The country is building a rare-earth mineral processing plant
in the east coast state of Orissa and it is spending around US$135
million to buy a new exploration ship and to retool another for
sophisticated deep-water exploration off its coast.

The Central Indian Basin, for example, is rich in nickel,
copper, cobalt and potentially rare-earth minerals, which are highly
lucrative and used widely in manufacturing electronics such as mobile
phone batteries. They are found in potato-shaped nodules on the deep-sea
floor.

"These nodules offer a good solution to meeting the nation's
demand for metals," C. R. Deepak, head of the deep-sea mining division
at the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai, told SciDev.Net.

The Indian government also plans to bring together its marine science experts and engineers in nuclear energy, space research and defence, using the their expertise to help accelerate mineral extraction, according to a July press statement.

India's network of government-sponsored marine science
programmes has already studied the seabed and carried out test mining,
according to Rahul Sharma, a scientist at India's National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in the west coast state of Goa.

India's ocean exploration programme
is about two decades old, and focuses on 'polymetallic nodules'
containing cobalt, copper, manganese and nickel, in addition to small
amounts of aluminium iron and rare metals such as molybdenum, tellurium
and titanium.*

"The mining engineers have already tested some systems at lower
depths and are in the process of up-scaling for deeper depths," Sharma
told SciDev.Net.

NIO has tested deep-sea mining systems up to a depth of 512
metres, off the coast of Mavlan, Goa, and is now working on systems
suited to depths of up to 6,000 metres.

Geopolitical tensions

The recent push for deep-sea mining exploration reflects
India's concerns that China's deep-sea excavations will further increase
China's dominance over rare-earth elements, which are used in aviation
and defence manufacturing, as well as electronics.

Late last year, the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and
Development Association (COMRA) obtained a licence to mine polymetallic
sulphides in the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR). The SWIR is a divergent
tectonic plate boundary between the African and Antarctic plates,
running from the South Atlantic to a junction — the place where two or
more plates meet — in the Indian Ocean just south of Madagascar.

In July, Ashwani Kumar, India's minister of planning, science and technology, and earth sciences, told local media that countries like China have begun deep-sea mining with the strategic purpose of staking a claim in the oceans.

Deep-sea mining will help meet the "critical and strategic
needs of the country, particularly in the area of access to rare earth
materials", Kumar said during last month's announcements regarding deep-sea deployments.

China currently controls around 95 per cent of global
rare-earth mineral output. The country has been accused of unfairly
restricting overseas mineral sales through taxes and quotas, to force
more high technology production to move to China.

The World Trade Organization agreed last month (23 July) to
create a panel to investigate China's influence in the market, following
complaints filed by the United States, the European Union and Japan —
the second biggest consumer of rare earths after China.

Lucrative rare-earth minerals are used in electronics manufacturing, aviation and the defence industry

Flickr/maltman 23

In 2010, for example, China blocked Japan's supply of
rare-earth minerals for two months, over skirmishes relating to disputed
territorial claims in the China Seas. Over the past week, tensions
between the two countries over similar territorial disputes have been
growing.

In June this year, Japan opened the Rare Earth Research and Technology Transfer Centre in Hanoi, in partnershipwith
Vietnam, as a response to fears over a supply crunch. It is also in
negotiations with India over investments in the Orissa processing plant,
according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. [1]

But so far, India has done little relating to the commercial mining of the seabeds.

In the past, like most governments, India found that
establishing mines under the sea would be more expensive than land-based
mining, according to Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of the global marine and polar programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It also considered that mineral costs did not justify the expenditure, Lundin explained.

More recently, however, worries over China's market domination
and its ability to set prices for rare earth and other minerals have
increased international interest in deep-sea mining. At the same time,
innovations in underwater robotics created for the petroleum industry
have improved prospects for mining undersea metals, Lundin said. So far, the only company with a licence to mine the seabed is the Canadian firm Nautilus Minerals.

In 2011, the company received a licence to mine massive seabed
sulphide resources at a depth of about 1,600 metres off the coast of
Papua New Guinea, as part of the much criticised Solwara 1 project.

However, Nautilus's president and executive director, Stephen Rogers, told SciDev.Net that countries like India may be better positioned than private companies to develop undersea resources.

"We see that there are many countries both exploring and developing technologies," Rogers said.

Several countries, including China and Korea, have been granted
seabed access; Japan is investing US$200 million in deep-sea
prospecting; and the United States has extensive research programmes
underway, Rogers said.

Environmental concerns

However, as the Indian Ocean explorations accelerate
and the first commercial endeavours in the Pacific get underway, a
clear international overview of the potential environmental impact of
the projects is still lacking.

Indian scientists have participated in International Seabed
Authority (ISA) workshops aimed at outlining how to regulate mines and
protect the marine environment, said NIO's Sharma. But these regulations
are still not finalised.

Helen Rosenbaum, campaign coordinator for the Australia-based Deep Sea Mining campaign, told SciDev.Net: "There's no regulatory framework, either at a national or international level, for deep-sea mining".

She said the International Seabed Authority, which has jurisdiction over the open seas outside national territories, has done too little to investigate and regulate the potential for environmental damage.

Additional reporting by T.V. Padma

*This story was corrected on 4 September to say 'rare metals', instead of 'rare earths'.